In the first part of this three-part essay, I outlined my reasons for embracing the (admittedly contentious) idea that at the age of twenty-eight, the philosopher—actually, the religio-philosopher—Plotinus (204/5–270 C.E.) experienced, quite without preparation, his first episode of altered consciousness, or, as he describes it, his first unification with ultimate reality, variously referred to as τὸ Ἕν (to En, the One), or πηγή (Pigi, the Source or Fount of all reality), or the μονάς (Monas, the Monad). This first experience of ἕνωσις (henosis, Oneness or Union), I suggested, impelled him to undertake philosophical (actually religio-philosophical) study, so as to understand this experience, which occurred unbidden and which he found somewhat bewildering. Experience of the transcendent seems to defy being captured in ordinary language—indeed, it can seem to elude verbal description altogether. But Plotinus had an extraordinary ability to suggest—often by resorting to quasi-poetic expressions—the phenomenology of alternative consciousness. Among those to whom he turned for guidance in formulating a metaphysics that could give a complete account of the phenomenological features of a consciousness radically discontinuous with ordinary consciousness was Plato. Plotinus considered himself as a true and loyal Platonist, a close reader of Plato (as well as other philosophers of the Classical and Hellenistic periods and those of the early Roman era). To some extent, Plotinus’s religio-metaphysics follows the model of the hierarchical scheme of Plato’s Parmenides: as Plato does in that dialogue, Plotinus distinguishes three hypostatic (underlying, essential) realities—as distinguished from attributes: the One (τὸ ἕν, to Hen); the Universal Intelligence or the Intellectual Principle (ὁ Νοῦς, ho Nous); and the Universal Soul or World Soul (ἡ Ψυχή, he Psuche).  Τὸ Ἕν (The One) is the source of the world: it is, in some sense, the ultimate source of everything else in the universe. But τὸ Ἕν does not produce the world through a creative act: it is pure dynamis, pure potentiality. Accordingly, ἐνέργεια (energeia, working, efficiency), or “tending-towards-actualization,” cannot be truthfully attributed to τὸ Ἕν. Activity cannot be ascribed to what which is immutable and unchangeable. Nonetheless, Plotinus argues the multiple cannot exist without the simple— so τὸ Ἕν must be the Ultimate Reality and must generate the other hypostases by a process of emanation or irradiation: the “less perfect” must, necessarily, “emanate” from (or issue from) the “perfect” or the “more perfect.” Furthermore, since τὸ Ἕν is pure dynamis, pure potentiality, it lies beyond all intelligibility.

Plotinus proclaimed himself a scrupulous exegete of the Platonic revelation—his writing, as I pointed out in the earlier installment, has a dialogical structure, as he carefully presents and refutes many anti-Platonist ideas. Among those he refuted was Aristotle. Plotinus agreed with Aristotle that there must be a first principle that is source of all and that it must be must be absolutely simple. To arrive at this principle, Aristotle traced the source or cause of phenomena to their origin: one phenomenon—one phenomenon’s coming to pass—was caused by some other, which in turn was caused by another. It must be possible to trace this chain back to a First Cause, or an Unmoved Mover. Aristotle identified this first principle as ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ (ho ou kinoúmenon kineî, that which moves without being moved). Book A.1 (1.1) of his Metaphysics deals with wisdom (σοφία, sophía) that “everyone takes to be concerned with . . .  the primary causes (αἰτία, aitía) and the starting-points (or principles, ἀρχαί, archaí).”¹ Book 12 (Greek: Λ) describes the Unmoved Mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation. It is in fact utter self-contemplation, which he identifies with the active intellect. 

While Plotinus agreed with Aristotle that an absolutely simple first principle must be the source of all, he maintained that Aristotle was mistaken in identifying that first principle with the Unmoved Mover, the self-thinking mind. Plotinus’s fundamental objection was that for something to be engaged in thinking, it must be thinking of something. Accordingly, the first principle of all, since it must be absolutely simple, cannot be intellect or intellection of any sort: all thinking involves a distinction between thinking and the object of thinking, even if that object—what we would now call the intentional object—is an aspect of the thinker. Indeed, to be able to distinguish aspects of some entity or phenomenon entails that the entity or phenomenon must possess some degree of complexity. But the source of all must be absolutely simple—it cannot possess different aspects. Rather like Plato’s Good, it must be beyond thinking and beyond being: Aristotle had identified the first principle with being (οὐσία ousia, essence, form, or nature) and described it as hypostasis (ὑπόστασις hypóstasis, that which is particular). This cannot be right, Plotinus averred: for the source of all must be unlimited, but οὐσία and ὑπόστασις are limited. 

Besides the Peripatetics, another group of anti-Platonists whom Plotinus refuted were the Stoics. Plotinus’s critique of the Stoics centred on their materialism. The Stoic materialist ontology could not provide an explanation of consciousness or intentionality. Plotinus begins his most famous Ennead, “On Beauty,” the first Ennead he composed, around 253 C.E., by posing the fundamental question of aesthetics: 

What then is it that is responsible for making bodies appear beautiful and for making sounds attractive, as beautiful, to our hearing? All that which in turn pertains to the soul, how is it beautiful? And are they all [beautiful] by one and the same beauty, or is beauty in body other than beauty in other things? And what might they, or it, be? (1.6.1.7–13)²

Then, as propædeutic to his own Platonist theory of aesthetic, he deals with the Stoic aesthetic, which by Plotinus’s time had become broadly accepted—the criticism takes up the entire first chapter of Ennead 6 (according to Porphyry’s organization). He dismisses the Stoics’ materialist theory of beauty as good proportion, a fitting ratio among the parts of an object that create a feeling of harmony. The lynchpin of his criticism is his insistence that beauty is unitary.

Following this refutation, he begins to expound his own conception of beauty. He starts with concrete experience, our actual response to beauty: 

So let us go back to the beginning and state what the primary beauty in bodies really is. It is something which we become aware of even at the first glance; the soul speaks of it as if it understood it, recognises and welcomes it and as it were adapts itself to it. But when it encounters the ugly it shrinks back and rejects it and turns away from it and is out of tune and alienated from it. (1.6.2.1–7)

He goes on to inquire into what factors allow the soul to recognize beauty. His answer is based on the Platonic doctrine of ἀνάμνησις (anamnesis, reminiscence or recollection): when the soul encounters something beautiful, a spiritual process akin to ἀνάμνησις allows the soul to see the Εἶδος (Form) in it and, at the same time, to recognize in itself the trace of a kindred reality, a λόγος (lógos) derived from and bound to the Εἶδος. The soul experiences pleasure and delight as it returns to its true self and remembers itself and what belongs to it. Here Plotinus goes beyond the Platonic idea that a soul recognizes the Εἶδος of beauty in bodies which participate in it: he claims that the soul’s experience of beauty—of welcoming anything when it sees it—is the result of recognizing an Εἶδος in it, of apprehending intuitively and in a flash something that belongs to the Ψυχή (the Intellect, World Soul, Divine Mind). It takes delight in experiencing the contents of the Divine Mind and in the fact that the soul’s true nature, its λόγος, is at one with the Intellective realm. Plotinus maintains it is not just the Εἶδος of the beautiful, but any Εἶδος that elicits this experience: bodies are beautiful to the extent that they participate in intelligible reality—and every Εἶδος (Form) belongs to the realm of the Intellect; the Form of beauty of not alone in this. 

Another philosopher whose works were read in Plotinus’s Academy, and who influenced Plotinus’s philosophy considerably, was Numenius and Numenius’s thought contributed to Plotinus’s vastly enlarged concept of ἀνάμνησις (anamnesis). The principal purpose of Numenius’s philosophic project was to trace the doctrines of Plato back to Pythagoras, and at the same time, to show that they were not at variance with the dogmas and mysteries of “Oriental” and Indian thought—through this, he provided a very Pythagoreanized portrait of Plato’s inner teachings (that incorporated beliefs about Egyptian and “Oriental” influences on Pythagoras). He opined that Plato’s authority was subordinate to that of Pythagoras, who was source of all true philosophy—including Plato’s own. He also highlighted the fact that some of Plato’s teachings (like Pythagoras’s) were passed on orally—one of Numenius’s works was titled On Plato’s Secret Doctrines (the text is lost). Numenius notes, for example, that in Physics (209b13–15), Aristotle says that Plato had used a concept in one dialogue differently than he did in “his so-called unwritten documents.”³ Numenius also remarks in Περὶ Τἀγαθοῦ(Peri Tagathou, On the Good)that to help him retrieve Plato’s (Pythagorean) legacy, he had to rely on information about those whom Plato admired, “the Brahmans, Jews, Mages, and Egyptians.”  

The two fundamental structuring “Ur-principles” that constitute the groundwork of Plato’s unwritten teachings are: 

Τὸ Ἕν (The One): the principle of integration (according to purpose) that makes things definite and determinate. In the Academy, Plato’s Image of the Sun stood for this principle.

The Indefinite Dyad (Gk., ahóristos dyás) or the Principle of Great and the Small (Gk., to méga kai to mikrón): the principle of indeterminacy and lack of fixed form.⁴ In the Academy, the Image of the Cave stood for this principle.⁵

The basis for Plotinus’s vastly enlarged account of ἀνάμνησις (anamnesis) and its role in the experience of beauty are the Ur-principles of Plato’s unwritten teachings, τὸ Ἕν (The One) as the principle of integration, of making things definite and determinate, and The Indefinite Dyad as the principle of indeterminacy, of that which lacks a fixed form. We appreciate whatever evinces integration, whatever is definite and determinate, and we recoil from whatever evinces apeiron, whatever is formless and unlimited. Thus Plotinus writes, “We maintain that the things in this world are beautiful by participating in form; for every shapeless thing which is naturally capable of receiving shape and form is ugly and outside the divine formative power as long as it has no share in formative power and form. And this is altogether ugly” (1.6.2.13–16; Plotinus goes on to offer a series of qualifications of the qualities of being determinate or indeterminate). One implication of this is to affirm the potential for all things to be beautiful of their kind (for indeterminacy is not real, but simply a failure to receive form—its potential to receive form is thus not actualized). Hence, Plotinus stressed the great beauty of this world—he is not a despiser of the world, as the Gnostics were. A second implication is that since the objects of the world have this value, the desire to reshape them according to our desires is wrong-headed. 

When soul is brought up to intellect, it is more beautiful. But intellect and what goes with it is soul’s beauty, its very own and not another’s, for then is soul truly and solely itself. (1.6.2.13–18)

Or, again, “What does ‘really exists’ mean?,” Plotinus asks (1.6.2.21). He responds:

That they exist as beauties. But the argument still requires us to explain why real beings make the soul lovable. What is this kind of glorifying light on all the virtues? Would you like to take the opposites, the uglinesses in soul, and contrast them with the beauties? Perhaps a consideration of what ugliness is and why it appears so will help us to find what we are looking for. Suppose, then, an ugly soul, dissolute and unjust, full of all lusts, and all disturbance, sunk in fears by its cowardice and jealousies by its pettiness, thinking mean and mortal thoughts as far as it thinks at all, altogether distorted, loving impure pleasures, living a life which consists of bodily sensations and finding delight in its ugliness. (1.6.2.22–31)

Virtue makes one’s soul beautiful as it purifies the soul (cf. Plato, Phaedo, 69c) bringing the soul back to itself and its origin in intellect and the Forms.

Prospect

To this point, I have summarized my (admittedly contentious) conclusions about the sources and shape of Plotinus’s metaphysics.  In what follows, I examine the parallels between Plotinus’s ideas on henosis and woman’s art (and cinéma feminine specifically), explore the reasons why the rise of what I call electrology (the new regime of thought and discourse that arose in response to electomagnetism’s supplanting Newtonian mechanics as the most advanced physical science) has revitalized the Neo-Platonist metaphysics, and consider how woman’s art (and cinéma feminine specifically) gave Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together) its substance and form as a Neo-Platonist work.⁶ That is, I try to triangulate the formative influences on Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together): an unbidden experience of altered consciousness, as understood through Plotinus’s religio-philosophy; women’s art (and cinéma feminine), including my modelling for women collaborators who worked on my projects (as well as theirs, sometimes); and electrology.  I start with the experience of an altered state of consciousness, interpreted through Plotinus, and specifically Ennead 1.7, “On Love.” 

Affects and the Rational Principle

In the first part of this three-part essay, following Armstrong, I commented that Ennead  6.7, “How the Multitude of Forms Came into Being, and On The Good,”  depicts the realm of the Divine Intellect as a world “boiling with life,” an eternal world which somehow contains time and movement and change and process. The experience of Divine Life, coursing through the Universal (ὁ Νοῦς) stirs us with Love.  

All things are filled full of life, and, we may say, boiling with life. They all flow, in a way, from a single spring, not like one particular breath or one warmth, but as if there was one quality which held and kept intact all the qualities in itself, of sweetness along with fragrance, and was at once the quality of wine and the characters of all tastes, the sights of colours and all the awarenesses of touch, and all that hearings hear, all tunes and every rhythm. (6.7.12.24–31)⁷

Later in the same Ennead, Plotinus writes,

Whatever it generated, then, was the power of the Good and had the form of good, and Intellect itself is good from [the many] which have the form of good, a good richly varied [sic]. And so, if one likens it to a living richly varied sphere, or imagines it as a thing all faces, shining with living faces, or as all the pure souls running together into the same place, with no deficiencies but having all that is their own, and universal Intellect seated on their summits so that the region is illuminated by intellectual light—if one imagined it like this one would be seeing it somehow as one sees another from outside; but one must become that, and make oneself the contemplation. (6.7.15.23–33)⁸

Plotinus recognizes that the belief that the soul is a number played an important role in Plato’s teachings, both written and unwritten. The influence that Amelius and Numenius of Apamea had on Plotinus likely amplified this Pythagorean theme. So Plotinus asks how, if the soul is a number, it can be subject to affects—or more generally, how affections can occur in a soul if it is a rational principle. Plotinus answers that “irrational reasons” and “unaffected affections” come upon the soul: 

If the Soul were material and had magnitude, it would be difficult, indeed quite impossible, to make it appear to be immune, unchangeable, when any of such emotions lodge in it. And even considering it as an Authentic Being, devoid of magnitude and necessarily indestructible, we must be very careful how we attribute any such experiences to it or we will find ourselves unconsciously making it subject to dissolution. If its essence is a Number or as we hold a Reason-Principle, under neither head could it be susceptible of feeling. We can think, only, that it entertains unreasoned reasons and experiences unexperienced, all transmuted from the material frames, foreign and recognized only by parallel, so that it possesses in a kind of non-possession and knows affection without being affected. How this can be demands enquiry. (3.6.1.24–37; here I have used McKenna’s translation, for its relative clarity)

I point out that Plotinus here writes in the language of poetry—of metaphor and paradox—not in the language of philosophical discourse. 

We must consider how happenings of this sort come about, Plotinus suggests. The gist of his answer is that

the actualisations of immaterial things take place without any accompanying alteration, otherwise they would perish; it is much truer to say that they remain unaltered when they become actual, and that being affected in actualisation belongs to things which have matter . . . And the desiring part when it acts by itself produces what is called unrestrained lust, for it does everything by itself and the other parts of the soul are not present to it, whose function it would be, if they were present, to master and direct it. If it saw the other parts it would be different, and would not do everything but might perhaps take a rest by looking, as far as it could, at the other parts.” (3.6.2.50–53; 61–67, Armstrong translation)

Plotinus goes on to ask what part of the soul (that is, the rational faculty) is said to be subject to affections and what sort of thing a part of a soul is (3.6.4).  As would be expected from the foregoing assertions, he answers that the

part of the soul which is subject to affections is not a body but a form. Certainly the desiring part is in matter, and so, too, is the part which governs nutrition, growth and generation, which is the root and principle of the desiring and affective form. But it is not proper to any form to be disturbed or in any way affected, but it remains static itself, and its matter enters into the state of being affected, when it does so enter, and the form stirs up the affection by its presence. (3.6.4.31–37)

He continues to develop this poetic religio-philosophical statement with a remarkable metaphor:

The causes of the movement are like the player, and the parts on which the affection makes its impact might correspond to the strings. For in the case of playing an instrument, too, it is not the tune which is affected, but the string; the string, however, would not be plucked [in tune] even if the player [the desiring part of the soul, a form-in-matter that remains unaffected] wished it, unless the tune [a downward-looking factor in the λόγος analogous to the appetitive part of the soul in the previous example, the part that governs nutrition, growth, and generation] said that it should be. (3.6.4.49–53)

Plotinus suggests how the soul might be purified of affects: “if there is turning . . . to the things above, away from those below, it is surely (is it not?) purification, and separation too, when it is the act of a soul which is no longer in body as if it belonged to it” (3.6.5.19–20).  

Plotinus turns to mythology—or, given how casual he is about the logical consistency of the details of the myth he recounts, we should probably say mythopoeisis—in attempting to give an account of the affection of love. The myth that Plotinus forges reconciles Plato’s discussion of love in the Phaedrus and in the Symposium, Love as a Goddess represented by Aphrodite, a Celestial Spirit (Δαίμων, Daimon), or as a state of mind.⁹ 

Before exploring Plotinus’s mythopoeic efforts, I must consider conceptually antecedent matters: the first are Pausanias’s comments on Aphrodite in the Symposium and the second are those portions of Plotinus’s exegesis of the Aphrodite myth that Pausanias expounds. Turning to the first topic, Pausanias, the second speaker in Plato’s Symposium (180d–181e),distinguishes between two forms of Aphrodite. First, there is Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία (Aphrodítē Ouranía, often referred to as Aphrodite Urania), Heavenly Aphrodite or Celestial Aphrodite, the daughter of Uranus; Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία then has no mother. Second, there is Ἀφροδίτη  Πάνδημος (Aphrodítē Pándēmos, that is, Aphrodite “common to all the people,” usually called Aphrodite Pandemos, though I shall refer to her as Common Aphrodite). Common Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Dione and is considerably younger than Celestial Aphrodite. 

Pausanias’s speech identifies Ἀφροδίτη  Πάνδημος (Aphrodite Pandemos) and Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία (Aphrodite Urania)—Celestial Aphrodite and Common Aphrodite—with two discrete types of love. The first type, associated with Ἀφροδίτη  Πάνδημος,is a profane love that seeks only sexual gratification, “ἐρῶσι τῶν σωμάτων μᾶλλον ἢ τῶν ψυχῶν” (Love of bodies rather than souls, 181b). The second type of love, related to Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία, καλῶς προτρέπων ἐρᾶν (encourages us to love honorably 181a). Love that is under Urania’s sway honours both a partner’s soul (‘τῶν ψυχῶν,’ 181b) and her wisdom (φρόνηση), and so it is the type of love that, Socrates says, should be pursued by philosophers.¹⁰ 

Plotinus lays out a hermeneutics of myth in §9 of “On Love” (3.5): 

Now myths, if they really are such, must do two things: split up temporally the things they refer to, and divide from one another many of the Entities’ aspects which, while existing as a unity, are yet distinct as regards rank and functions. After all, even reasoned discourses, like myths, on the one hand assume ‘births’ of things which are unbegotten, and, on the other, divide things which exist as a unity. When the myths have fulfilled their didactic function to the best of their ability, they make it possible for the perceptive learner to come to a re-integration. (3.5.9.24–29)

The hermeneutics of myth involves two processes: first, διαίρεσις (diaíresis, division) and, second, συναίρεσις (synaíresis, synthesis).¹¹ Plotinus tells us here that the διαίρεσις has a twofold character: it is both temporal and aspectual/conceptual. As concerns the temporal character of mythic διαίρεσις, myth, like rational discourse, presents diachronically realities that are atemporal—for example, myths suggest the birth of things which are unbegotten. As concerns the conceptual/aspectual character of mythic διαίρεσις, myths, like reasoned discourse, isolate aspects or characteristics of entities/persons whose existence is inextrically linked to a larger, organic whole. When a myth’s didactic function has been fulfilled, then a synairetic act of the interpreter re-unites these elements that have been separated. The allegories presented in mythic form come to life in the realm of actual beings.

Types of Eros

The first section of Ennead 3.5 (On Love) focuses on Eros as πάθος (pathos), an affect, a condition of the human soul. Despite Pausanias’s emphasis on the duality of Aphrodite, Plotinus distinguishes three forms of eros. There is, first, a καθαρός έρως (katharós éros), a pure eros directed towards beauty as an intelligible form. Such an erotic feeling is connected to the appreciation of the beautiful in the world, without any involvement of the bodily desires. And, while the nature of the object of love as an intelligible beauty entails that a recollection (anamnesis) of true Intelligible Beauty is involved, people who experience καθαρός έρως may not consciously recollect and understand the role of Intelligible Beauty in any particular instance of the affection. 

The second from of eros is μικτός έρως (miktós éros), mixed eros. This form of eros is the exultation of Beauty through actional sexual arousal that issues in sexual activity directed towards the generation of offspring. Plotinus deems such feelings to be noble, though μικτός έρως is not as highly lofty as καθαρός έρως.

By way of contrast, the third type of eros is ignoble, for it is desire contrary to nature—it is, by its nature (παρὰ φύσιν) a deviation from the order of the cosmos. It is σε αντίθεση με την φύση (se antíthesi me ti phūsi).¹² 

Plotinus starts out (3.5.1.10–11) by saying that Love is a superhuman reality—a god or a spirit— to whom the human soul is beholden for generating the affection of love, and that this affection arises in souls that long to be knit in the closest union with some beautiful object. He notes, 

 if someone assumed that the origin of love was the longing for beauty itself which was there before in men’s souls, and their recognition of it and kinship with it and unreasoned awareness that it is something of their own, he would hit, I think, on the truth about its cause. For the ugly is opposed to nature and to God. For nature when it creates looks towards beauty, and it looks towards the definite, which is “in the column of the good”; but the indefinite is ugly and belongs to the other column. (3.5.1.17–24)

The gist of the remark concerning the definite and the indefinite is widely misunderstood. I pointed out in the first part of this three-part essay, that the groundwork of Plato’s unwritten teaching are: 

Τὸ Ἕν (The One): the principle of integration (according to purpose) that makes things definite and determinate. In the Academy, Plato’s Image of the Sun stood for this principle.

The Indefinite Dyad (ahóristos dyás) or the Principle of Great and the Small (to méga kai to mikrón): the principle of indeterminacy and lack of fixed form.¹³ In the Academy, the Image of the Cave stood for this principle.

I also pointed out there that the basis for this vastly enlarged account of ἀνάμνησις (anamnesis) and its role in the experience of beauty, which Plotinus is drawing on here, are the Ur-principles of Plato’s unwritten teachings, τὸ Ἕν (The One) as the principle of integration, of making things definite and determinate, and The Indefinite Dyad as the principle of indeterminacy, of that which lacks a fixed form. We appreciate what evinces integration, whatever is definite and determinate, and we recoil from whatever evinces apeiron, whatever is formless and unlimited.

Plotinus continues,

And nature has its origin from above, from the Good and, obviously, from Beauty. But if anyone delights in something and is akin to it, he has an affinity also with its images. . . . For these certainly want to “bring forth in beauty”: for it would be absurd for nature, when it wants to create beautiful things, to want to generate in ugliness. (3.5.1.24–34)

Plotinus turns from discussing love as a state of mind, to Love, the God. For ordinary people, theologians, and even Plato maintain there is such a divine being. Plotinus speaks of Eros in a way that was traditional in Greek mythology (and consistent with Eros’s depictions in Greek vase painting), as the love child of Aphrodite (3.5.2.2): and he points out that in the Symposium, Plato says that Eros was not born of Aphrodite, but on Aphrodite’s birthday, with Penia (Poverty) being the mother and Poros (Possession), the father (3.5.2.8–10). 

To understand this, further concepts from Plotinus’s religious metaphysics must be introduced. In the first part of this three-part essay, I pointed out that Plotinus’s emanationist religio-philosophy proposed that radiations from τὸ Ἕν gave rise to Νοῦς (Nous) or Intellect and that from it proceeds ἡ Ψυχή (hē Psuchē, the World Soul). ἡ Ψυχή Soul is the connecting link between the suprasensual world and the sensual world, between Νοῦς and matter—ἡ Ψυχή not only generates individual souls, but is also responsible, again by a process of emanation, for the existence of matter and the physical world. Plotinus subdivides the World Soul into upper and lower parts. In its superior part, it looks upwards towards the Νοῦς, while in its inferior part, it looks downward towards nature, which it creates according to the ideas that reside in the Divine Mind (3.8.4). I also pointed out there that Plotinus’s views on matter follow a similar pattern, as he considers matter as having both an idealist and a realist/materialist aspect. The idealist aspect consists in ordinary things deriving their identity, quality, and quantity from their λόγοι (lógoi)—their forms or structures or intelligible natures—expressible in definitions or archetypes, principles that are fully accessible only to the mind; their lower, material nature consists in the “depth of each body [being] matter. Therefore all matter is dark, because the formula (lόgos) is light” (Ennead 2.4.5.)¹⁴ Plotinus recurs to this pattern in forging his myth of Love.

Now we say that Aphrodite is double; one, the heavenly, we say is the “daughter of Heaven,” and the other, the one “born of Zeus and Dione,” takes charge of earthly marriages as their guardian; but that other is “motherless” and above marriages, because there are no marriages in heaven. The heavenly one, since she is said to be the child of Kronos, and he is Intellect, must be the most divine kind of soul, springing directly from him, pure from the pure, remaining above, as neither wanting nor being able to descend to the world here below, since it is not according to her nature to come down, since she is a separate reality and a substance without part in matter—for which reason they spoke of her riddlingly in this way, that she was “motherless” [she was the daughter of Uranus]; one would be right in speaking of her as a goddess, not as a spirit, since she is unmixed and remains pure by herself. For that which derives its nature immediately from Intellect is itself, too, pure, since it is strong in itself by its nearness, since, too, Soul’s desire and its abiding-place are close to its parent principle which is strong enough to hold it above; for which reason Soul which is immediately dependent on Intellect could not fall away; it is much more firmly held than the sun holds the light which shines out from himself around him, which comes from him and is closely joined to him. (3.5.2.15–33)

This mytheme maintains that the Celestial Aphrodite, the daughter of Kronos who is no other than the Intellectual Principle, must be the most divine sort of Soul, an unmingled emanation (she must be purely Intellectual, with no admixture of anything material), remaining ever in the Above for she neither wants to nor is capable of descending to this realm of ordinary life: she is a divine Hypostasis, essentially aloof, and so pure—she is Authentic Being without any relation to matter.  As Plotinus notes, she is mythically “the unmothered,” not a Celestial Daimon but a God, and enclosed purely within its own being, with no admixture of otherness. This mytheme provides the foundation of Plotinus’s theory of henosis. 

Plotinus’s mythopoeic efforts continue,

Now since Aphrodite follows upon Kronos—or, if you like, the father of Kronos, Heaven—she directed her activity towards him and felt affinity with him, and filled with passionate love for him brought forth Love, and with this child of hers [Eros] she looks towards him; her activity has made a real substance, and the two of them look on high, the mother who bore him and the beautiful Love who has come into existence as a reality always ordered towards something else beautiful, and having its being in this, that it is a kind of intermediary between desiring and desired, the eye of the desiring which through its power gives to the lover the sight of the object desired; but Love himself runs on ahead and, before he gives the lover the power of seeing through the organ [of bodily sight], he fills himself with gazing, seeing before the lover but certainly not in the same way, because he fixes the sight firmly in the lover, but himself plucks the fruit of the vision of beauty as it speeds past him. (3.5.2.33–46).

Celestial Aphrodite (The Soul) directs her activities towards Kronos or Kronos’s Father, Heaven; and that regard engenders Eros, through whom She continues to look towards Him (Kronos or Kronos’s Father, Heaven). This produces a hypostasis, an actual being. The mother and her offspring, this hypostasis, noble Love together gaze upwards towards the divine Divine Mind. This love (Eros) fills the lover’s eye with a special power of seeing—it engenders Vision, a higher form of seeing. 

Plotinus took up the challenge of reconciling Plato’s discussion of love in the Phaedrus with the Symposium’s very different commentary. To do so, he had to reconcile the idea that Eros is a God, the son and disciple of Aphrodite, and the idea, propounded by Diotima in the Symposium, that he is Celestial Spirit (Δαίμων, Daimon). Plotinus reconciles these ideas by petitioning to the distinction between Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία (Heavenly Aphrodite) and Ἀφροδίτη  Πάνδημος (Common Aphrodite)—thus he performed διαιρεῖν (diaireín), the act of separating or dividing. In Plotinus’s version of the myth, Eros-qua-divine is the offspring of Celestial Aphrodite (Aphrodite Uranus), who is the Undescended Soul, pure and free from any engagement with matter (see §2), while Eros-qua-daimon is a descendant of Common Aphrodite (the offspring of Zeus and Dione), who is the World-Soul or the Descended Psyche (see. §3). Eros-qua-god correlates with καθαρός έρως (katharós éros) or Pure Eros, while Eros-qua-daimon correlates with μικτός έρως (miktós éros), Mixed Eros, the human soul’s noble forms of affection. This reconciliation confronts several complexities. According to the Phaedrus and the mytho-theological tradition it draws on (stemming from Hesiod), Eros is son of Aphrodite (he is ἐξ αὐτῆς, ex aftís, beholden to her), while in the Symposium he is said to begotten by Πενία’s (Penía, Poverty) union with Πόρος (Póros, Plenty or Resource) on Aphrodite’s birthday. 

This perplexity makes itself felt throughout Ennead 3.5, “On Love.” In §2, Plotinus writes, “Now since Aphrodite follows upon Kronos—or, if you like, the father of Kronos, Uranus—Aphrodite directed her activity [the Soul’s intellectual processes] towards him and was made akin to him” (adapted from Armstrong, 3.5.2.32–34). Here Kronos, or Kronos’s father Uranus, Aphrodite’s progenitor, is ὁ Νοῦς, (ho Nous) and Aphrodite herself is the Universal Soul or World Soul (ἡ Ψυχή, he Psuche). Plotinus continues, “Being in love with Kronos/Uranus/Nous, brought forth Eros, and with Eros she looks towards Kronos/Uranus/Nous” (adapted from Armstrong, 2.34–35). Here, Aphrodite begets Eros. Plotinus then repeats this assertion, before supplementing it with a stunning claim that is difficult to reconcile with the overall triadic structure of his metaphysics—his fundamental belief that there are three Principal Hypostases (τὸ Ἕν or the One; ὁ Νοῦς or the Universal Intelligence; and ἡ Ψυχή or the Universal Soul). He writes, “her activity [ἐνέργεια] has made a real substance, and the two of them look upwards, both the mother who gave birth [that is, Aphrodite/the Soul] and the beautiful Eros who was born as a ὑπόστασιν καὶ οὐσίαν εἰργάσατο—a hypostasis and real being—ordered towards some other Beautiful [that is Kronos/Uranas/Nous] and having its being in it” (adapted from Armstrong 2.35–39). Thus Plotinus asserts that Aphrodite/the Soul directs her ἐνέργεια (energeia, working, efficiency) or “tending-towards-actualization” towards Nous and cleaves to him, making herself like him; this ἐνέργεια or “tending-towards-actualization” engenders a love that begets the Eros. Thus Aphrodite/the Soul’s ἐνέργεια produced ὑπόστασιν καὶ οὐσίαν εἰργάσατο—a Hypostasis and Real being; and the mother and this Hypostasis—her offspring, noble Love gaze together upon Divine Mind. Presumably, Plotinus, in describing Aphrodite/Soul (3.5.2.25) as χωριστὴν οὖσάν τινα ὑπόστασιν καὶ ἀμέτοχον ὕλης οὐσία (a separate existence and a substance without any involvement in matter) suggests that the Celestial Aphrodite is the Universal Soul, a true offspring of Nous, and thus an actual hypostasis. Eros, who descends from the Universal Soul, in being said to be ὑπόστασιν καὶ οὐσίαν εἰργάσατο, is affirmed to have the ontological status of a real being, but one of a lower order than Nous or the World Soul. Here ὑπόστασις means simply existence; it does not stake a claim for Eros’s having a status equivalent any level of the τρεις κύριες υποστάσεις (three primary hypostases, see 5.1). 

Emanations, Images, and Love

Formulating a coherent interpretation of Plotinus’s account of Love, what it owes to the Intellect, and what sort of υποστάσεις (here, existent) it is, is no easy task—the exegetical demands of any passage in Plotinus are formidable, but Ennead 5.3 is unusually difficult. I find the account in chapter 3 of Eyjólfur K. Emilsson’s Plotinus, most helpful.¹⁵ Before introducing that discussion, I allude to a point made by the Plotinus scholar Dominc O’Meara. He suggests (contra Leroux) that in the later chapters of Ennead 8.8 (On Free Will and the Will of the One),

Plotinus distinguishes between the (logical) necessity of thinking as it corresponds to absolute knowledge and the intellectual persuasion soul needs when it has not yet attained knowledge. Persuasive arguments are appropriate for soul when it finds itself in intellectual confusion and difficulty; they help soul through its dilemmas and towards better understanding . . . In chs. 13ff. Plotinus proposes a series of persuasive arguments falling short of what is correct (cf. 18, 52–3), yet serving to raise soul up to a better view of things (cf. 19, 1–3). We could describe these arguments as conceptual exercises, a philosophical therapy for the confused soul which is scarcely satisfactory as a discourse about the One. At the end of the treatise (21, 26–8) Plotinus stresses once more the ultimate need to remove all predicates that we might wish to attach to the One.¹⁶

I cite this as a reminder for the reader of the sort of truth we ought to expect from the ensuing discussion.

Regarding the generation of second and third hypostases from the first (Νοῦς and Ψυχή from τὸ Ἕν), Emilsson writes,

The general metaphorical idea seems to be that there is such an abundance [of goodness] that there is an overflow: “This, we may say, is the first act of generation: the One, perfect because it seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing, overflows, as it were and its superabundance makes something other than itself” (5.2.1.7–9).¹⁷

Emilsson connects these claims with two levels of the self. 

Plotinus holds, echoing Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics IX, 1166a16–17) that we ourselves are mostly are at the level of discursive reason (dianoia) (cf 1.1.7.17; 5.3.3.35). Discursive reason is our everyday reason, the faculty by which we estimate our present situation, plan our future and reflect on the past. In the literature on Plotinus the “we” at the level of discursive reason is sometimes referred to as the empirical self. . . . [I showed earlier] that in 5.1 Plotinus’ aim was to boost the human soul’s self-esteem by showing it in its kinship with the likeness of the soul at large. Actually, Plotinus holds that we, every one of us, have intelligible roots and that something of us remains in the pure intelligible realm . . .. We may call this our intelligible or noetic self as distinct from the empirical one. So our task in life is not merely to inspect and appreciate the intelligible as foreign tourists: doing so involves going to our own roots, raising the empirical self to the level of the intelligible one.¹⁸

Emilsson also notes that Plotinus’s world is stratified according to its degree of unity and multiplicity: ὁ Νοῦς (the Intellect) is more unified (and less diverse) than ἡ Ψυχή (World Soul); and ἡ Ψυχή (the Universal Soul or World Soul) is more unified (and less diverse) than the individual, noetic self; and the noetic self more unified (and less diverse) than the empirical self. In Ennead 5.1, Plotinus writes about the process we have called emanation, and attempts to show how a principle can generate another being, giving to that external being qualities like its own internal being, but in the process it loses nothing.  

For, although [the soul] is a thing of the kind our discussion has shown it to be, it is a kind of image (eikōn) of Intellect: just as an uttered rational formula (logos) is an image (eikōn) of the rational formula in soul, so soul itself is a rational formula of Intellect, and its whole activity [ενέργεια, enérgeia RBE] and the life which it sends off to establish another reality; as fire has the heat which remains with it and the heat which it gives. But one must understand that the activity on the level of Intellect does not flow out from it, but the external activity comes into existence as something distinct. (5.1.3.6–12).

Plotinus, Emilsson notes, is explaining how soul’s thought is neither ontologically identical to the original thought in the Intellect, nor a perfect, exact replication of it. It can be described, more or less, as an image of the idea in Intellect. He also points out that Plotinus used the term logos, which he translates as rational formula. The term, in fact, is heavy-laden with meaning among Classical Greek philosophers; it acquired many more meanings in Hellenistic and Roman Worlds; and Plotinus endowed it additional nuances. But to simplify the main thrust of the Plotinian use of the term, we note that the noun logos derives from the verb legein, which, in ordinary use, could mean to pick up or lay down, to collect, to give an account or explanation, to tell, to recount. Plotinus, following the idea which seemed to be a essentially a self-evident truth among Greek philosophers, that “actuality [ἐνέργεια, energeia] is prior to potentiality [δύναμις, dunamis],” i.e., that something that is potentially X  becomes an X by having its potential actualized by something that is already an X.¹⁹ (Aristotle’s standard example is that a human being begets a human being—Aristotle understood the genesis of human being differently than we do today, but we can explain the idea in contemporary terms by saying that an ovum is a potential human being, and sperm—an actual being—from a male human activates the ovum’s potential so that a human being is produced). It is because it can be actualized that the potential, in the primary sense, is potential; but in Plotinus’s view (as in that of most Classical Greek philosophers), it needs to be activated by higher-order actually. The logos is the potential that can be activated by some higher-order actuality.  

Plotinus’s idea of generation, then, is modelled on the idea of internal activity (energeia) and external effect and the paradigm/imitation template. Another cardinal notion in framing Plotinus’s theory of generation/emanation is that of conversion.  Emilsson defines conversion (ἐπιστροφη, epistrophē) in this way:

There is not only an unfolding from [emanating from] the principles but also a kind of turning of that which has gone out [from the principles] towards the principles. This is what is meant by “conversion”; it has a similar function in Plotinus to imitation in Plato. Conversion is generally assumed to be some sort of mental or psychological act directed at the principle from which it came. Such an act is often referred to as contemplation (theoria). As a result the emanation is informed by the superior principle and settles in a new hypostasis that is the internal activity of the stage below.²⁰

Immediately after the passage from 5.1.3.6–12 quoted above (“For, although [the soul] is a thing of the kind our discussion has shown it to be, it is a kind of image (eikōn) of Intellect”), Plotinus goes on to say,

Since then [the Soul’s] existence derives from Intellect, soul is intellectual, and its intellect is in discursive reasonings (logismos), and its perfection comes from Intellect, like a father who brings to maturity a son whom he begat imperfect in comparison with himself. Soul’s establishment in reality, then, comes from Intellect, and its thought becomes actual in its seeing of Intellect. (5.1.3.13–17)

Emilsson notes (p. 58) that when discussing ἐπιστροφη (epistrophē), Plotinus shifts his lexicon, shifting from terms alluding to physical processes (relating to heat, light, and water, none of which evince any tendency to turn back towards their source) to terms evoking psychological processes: need, longing, and vision. As Emilsson comments, “The ‘efflux’ needs its source and ‘looks’ back in an attempt to capture it. As a result, it is filled and becomes fully itself.”²¹ 

Emilsson amplifies the description:

The Plotinian conversion is a tending of thought. After all, every activity below the One, including the operations of nature, is a kind of thought (3.8.30). We may compare this [principle/image] to a teacher and pupil: the teacher’s knowledge emanates from her in the form of speech and gestures. As every teacher knows, this is not enough however: the pupil must direct her mind to what has been sent out. As Plotinus does not posit any kind of pre-existent matter as the recipient of form, what becomes informed must come from the informing source. Thus, the outgoing aspect functions as a material or receiving principle, the conversion aspect as the informing of it. 

. . . . a way to think about it is to imagine the emanation as always facing the source; the emanation, so to speak, departs from its source facing it. It follows that it is incorrect to conceive of the emanative aspect merely as the establishment of a receptacle which, later, is to be informed: what goes out is already informed, already an image of the source.²²

Emilsson also notes that Plotinus’s account, modelled as it is on Plato’s idea of imitation and Aristotle’s ideas of love and desire as cosmological agents, supposes that the process of emanation and conversion involves a sort of striving towards a goal. 

ἡ Ψυχή (the Soul), then, is an image of the Νοῦς  (Intellect). ἡ Ψυχή is lower than Νοῦς in the hierarchy of the principles, because its degree of unity is less. Nonetheless, there are attributes that belong uniquely to the ἡ Ψυχή. ἡ Ψυχή’s distinctive mental process is that of διάνοια (dianoia, discursive reasoning) while Νοῦς’s characteristic form of thought is νόησις (nóisis, noesis), the highest form of knowledge, a pure intuitive apprehension that transcends discursive reason. Recall that Plotinus, unlike the majority of Neo-Platonists that followed him, believed the Forms are ideas in the Divine Intellect—indeed, when he first arrived at Plotinus’s Academy, Porphyry, Plotinus’s anthologist, still maintained the doctrine he had learned from his teacher Cassius Longinus (who had also studied under Ammonius), that the Platonic Forms are outside the Divine Intellect and constitute templates according to which god makes the objects of the world. Porphyry stubbornly refused to surrender that conviction, and Plotinus assigned Amelius, another disciple of the Plotinus’s Academy the job of convincing Porphyry of the truth of Plotinus’s view; after a series of written exchanges between Amelius and Porphyry, the compiler of Plotinus’s writings finally converted to Plotinus’s teaching.  

Since the Forms are all eternally present in the Divine Mind, νόησις, Νοῦς’s characteristic mental process, grasps all its Ideas, all at once. Διάνοια, by way of contrast, is a process, something that occurs across time: it apprehends one Form, then another, then another. Thus, the contents of ἡ Ψυχή change (and so ἡ Ψυχή is less unified than Νοῦς). Anything that Νοῦς apprehends can also be grasped by ἡ Ψυχή—and the objects of Ψυχή’s knowledge are the same Νοῦς’s: they are the Platonic Forms. But Ψυχή apprehends them in a more laborious way—a way that, because διάνοια is time-bound, cannot fully appreciate their eternal, timeless character. Διάνοια knows seriatim, and so partially, what νόησις apprehends completely and totally. A similar comparison could be made between the downward-looking νοῦς and the empirical self. 

Love Arises from Life Stirring in the World of the Forms

To return to the exegesis of myth of Eros as being generated from Zeus (while Plotinus generally identifies Νοῦς with Kronos, in §8 Νοῦς is identified with Zeus) on Heavenly Aphrodite’s birthday, through the intercourse of Πόρος (Póros, Plenty) and Πενία (Penνa, Poverty): Πόρος and Πενία are aspects of the hypostasis that emanates from Zeus/Νοῦς. Their role in the process becomes clear by considering the foregoing remarks on conversion. From this point of view, Πενία comes to represent Soul’s indefiniteness, a kind of psychic substrate, before it is informed by the emanated λόγοι from Nous. Zeus/Νοῦς is the principle that emanates Eros by thought. Πενία represents the image formed by this emanation, the soul’s indefiniteness—the psychic equivalent to an indefinite substrate, before being made more definite as its  λόγοι lead it to look lovingly at Zeus/Νοῦς and to identify with Zeus/Νοῦς’s Λόγος (the shift from singular to plural appears in Plotinus, and suggests the fact that the rational formulae that animate Eros’s life are imperfect copies—their multiplicity itself suggests their relative lower status on the ladder of being than Νοῦς’s Λόγος). These λόγοι are what Πόρος represents. The simultaneity of principle and image, and of the unformed element of the emanation and its informed partner, are represented by the amorous conjunction of Πόρος and Πενία—that same figure also represents the offspring’s longing, striving, and neediness.

This myth allows Plotinus to speak of the role of love in appreciating the dynamism—the Life—of the world of the Forms. In the first part of this three-part essay, I commented on Plotinus’s experiences of altered forms of consciousness (ἕνωσις, henosis, unification with ultimate reality) and conjectured that it was the unbidden experience of altered consciousness that impelled Plotinus on his inquiries into world philosophies (Indian and Near-Eastern religio-philosophies and the religio-philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato, including Plato’s unwritten teachings). Plotinus also found that these experiences of elevated consciousness transformed his everyday experience of wonder at the contemplation of εἶδος (eidos), the loving contemplation in which, fascinated by the presence of divine Life and Thought, he somehow lost himself. Plotinus now discovers, in the midst of the experience just described, the traces of an experience more profound, more intense, and more moving, albeit not yet conscious: that of love. And as he recognizes its trace, he has a premonition of something of which Intellect—that is to say, divine Life and Thought—is only the manifestation. 

Seeing the dynamic Life stirring the world of Forms and sustaining them in their wonderful intelligibility fills us with love. What causes this affection to arise in us? What precisely is love? Can any object, irrespective of its beauty, adequately explain the love it kindles within us? 

What therefore is it which is one in all these and makes each and every one of them good? Let us, then, make bold to say this: Intellectual-Principle and that life are of the order of good and hold their desirability, even they, in virtue of belonging to that order; they have their goodness, I mean, because Life is an Activity in The Good, — Or rather, streaming from The Good — while Intellectual-Principle is an Activity already defined Therein; both are of radiant beauty and, because they come Thence and lead Thither, they are sought after by the soul—sought, that is, as things congenial though not veritably good while yet, as belonging to that order not to be rejected. For what is akin to one, if it is not good, is indeed akin, but one avoids it; since [if it was otherwise] other things also which are far off and deep below might move one to desire. The intense love called forth by Life and Intellectual-Principle is due not to what they are but to the consideration of their nature as something apart, received from above themselves. For just as with bodies, though light is mixed into them, all the same there is need of another light for the light, the colour, in them to appear, so with the things there in the intelligible, though they possess much light, there is need of another greater light that they may be seen both by themselves and by another. (modified from Armstrong, 6.7.21.1–21, drawing heavily from McKenna) 

One feels love when some hard-to-describe element is added to beauty: a sort of aura that suggests movement, dynamism, life kindles a vague yearning. Absent this element, beauty remains inert, cold, without any feeling of life: “Even in this world, we must say that beauty consists less in symmetry than in the light that shines upon the symmetry, and this light is what is desirable. After all, why is it that the splendor of beauty shines more brightly upon a living face while only a trace of beauty appears on the face of a dead man? … Why is an ugly man, as long as he is alive, more beautiful than the beauty of a statue?” (6.7.22.24–32)

When anyone, therefore, sees this light, then truly he is also moved to the Forms, and longs for the light which plays upon them and delights in it, just as with the bodies here below our desire is not for the underlying material things but for the beauty imaged upon them. For each is what it is by itself; but it becomes desirable when the Good colours it, giving a kind of grace to them and passionate love to the desirers. Then the soul, receiving into itself an outflow from thence, is moved and dances wildly and is all stung with longing and becomes love. Before this it is not moved even towards Intellect, for all its beauty; the beauty of Intellect is inactive till it catches a light from the Good, and the soul by itself “falls flat on its back” and is completely inactive and, though Intellect is present, is unenthusiastic about it. But when a kind of warmth from thence comes upon it, it gains strength and wakes and is truly winged; and though it is moved with passion for that which lies close by it, yet all the same it rises higher, to something greater which it seems to remember. And as long as there is anything higher than that which is present to it, it naturally goes on upwards, lifted by the giver of its love. It rises above Intellect, but cannot run on above the Good, for there is nothing above. But if it remains in Intellect it sees fair and noble things, but has not yet quite grasped what it is seeking. It is as if it was in the presence of a face which is certainly beautiful, but cannot catch the eye because it has no grace playing upon its beauty. So here below also beauty is what illuminates good proportions rather than the good proportions themselves, and this is what is lovable. For why is there more light of beauty on a living face, but only a trace of it on a dead one, even if its flesh and its proportions are not yet wasted away? And are not the more lifelike statues the more beautiful ones, even if the others are better proportioned? And is not an uglier living man more beautiful than the beautiful man in a statue? Yes, because the living is more desirable; and this is because it has soul; and this is because it has more the form of good; and this means that it is somehow coloured by the light of the Good, and being so coloured wakes and rises up and lifts up that which belongs to it, and as far as it can makes it good and wakes it (6.7. 22.1–36)

If things remained confined solely to their inherent characteristics, essence, and arrangement, they wouldn’t possess the capacity to evoke love. Love always transcends the object of its affection, regardless of how elevated that object may be. The object itself can never offer a complete explanation or validation for the love it generates. What we love is imbued with some power and gleam and grace—this inexplicable something within lacks rational justification—it is grace, or the profound enigma of Life. Forms and structures can be rationalized, but life and grace cannot be. They embody an unaccounted surplus that is of paramount significance. In this surplus, Plotinus identifies “the imprint of the Good.” To repeat, “For each is what it is by itself; but it becomes desirable when the Good colours it, giving a kind of grace to them and passionate love to the desirers” (6.7. 22.5–7).

Life, Love, and Dynamism

What awakens love is beautiful—gracious—movement that reveals the wondrous creativity of Life. Plotinus makes the same point in another passage from Ennead 5, “On the Three Primary Hypostases” 

Before all let every Soul remember that itself is the creator of every living thing, having breathed the life into them: into all that the earth nourishes and the sea; all that are in the air and all the divine stars in the heavens; itself has formed the sun and this vast firmament of sky: itself has given them their stately ordering and leads them around in their ranks: and it is a Nature apart from all to which it gives the order and the movement and the life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they; for they are things whose being has had a beginning, and they perish when the Soul that leads the chorus-dance of life departs, but the Soul itself has ever-being since it cannot suffer change. . . . As rays from the sun pour light upon a gloomy cloud and make it shine in a golden glory, so the Soul when it comes to body touches it to life, brings immortality to it, wakes it where it lies prostrate; and the heavenly-system, taking up its everlasting movement under the leading of the wisdom of the Soul, becomes a blissful living-being, venerable with the Soul that dwells within, a dead body before the Soul came, or rather mere darkness of Matter, Non-Being, “hated of the gods.” (5.1.2)²³

Plotinus continues by stating that this cosmic, life-affirming cosmic dance applies to the smallest particle—this same governing energy guides every particle, great or small:

What the Soul is, and what its power, will be more manifestly, more splendidly, evident, if we think how its counsel comprehends and conducts the heavens, how it communicates itself to all this vast bulk and ensouls it through all its extension, through big and little so that every particle of the great frame, though each has its own need and function and some are closely linked and some far apart, every particle has its own place in Soul.

But the Soul itself is not thus dismembered, it does not give life parcelwise, a fragment of Soul to a fragment of matter; every fragment lives by the Soul entire which is present everywhere, present as a unit and as an Universal, as is the Father that engendered it. (ibid.)

In the next installment of this three-part essay, we shall see that this idea that “every fragment lives by the Soul entire which is present everywhere, present as a unit and as a Universal, as is the Father that engendered it” is the fundamental tenet of Alfred North Whitehead’s extravagant cosmology founded on the ideas of Michael Faraday and John Clerk Maxwell; it will serve as as a hook that links Plotinus’s metaphysics to what I call the electrological paradigm and to woman’s experience / women’s art. We turn now to introduce the topic of women’s art and the fluid boundaries.

Women’s Experience, Women’s Art

Plotinus’s commentary on the Soul is consonant with the third topic I want to draw into a triangular relation, that is the topic of women’s experience / women’s art.  In Ennead 6.4, “The Presence of Being Everywhere,” Plotinus writes,

The Souls are separate without being distinct; they are present to each other as one; they are no more sundered by boundaries than are the manifold elements of a science in any one mind: the one Soul is of such a nature as to include all, for it knows nothing of limits. (6.4.4) 

Or again, stating views that, we shall see, undergird the ideas of women’s performance art, Plotinus states in Ennead 4.9, “If All Souls Are One,”

We share each others’ feelings; if we see another in distress we suffer with him; we are irresistibly impelled to form friendships: incantations and other magical practices draw us together and call out sympathetic response from afar: all this is a token to us of the unity of the Souls. (4.9.3)

And confirming this consonance, two chapters later, he observes,

The particular Souls merge into one Soul which has given itself to form the Multiplicity and yet has kept its character: it is of a quality to remain one though it bestow itself upon all; its potency runs to all at once; it is present in every particular Soul and is the same in them all: no one need baulk at this doctrine if he will but think how a science, with all its detail, constitutes one whole: the whole remains a unity and yet is divisible into its parts.” (4.9.5)

Learning From My Graduate Students 

From the time I began teaching, I attempted to link my teaching, writing, and media-making. Among my early teaching assignments was a course “Photographing the Human Figure.” The course was assigned to me after a friend-colleague, a brilliant sculptor who had taken up photography when he was appointed to our department, withdrew in disgust, saying that students treated the course as a series of “shoot the bare lady” sessions. Needless to say, misogyny was the dominant feeling in the classroom. My interest in nudes in general, and in filmed nudes in particular, was two-fold: first, the act of creating a nude image (or a series of nude images) provides an opportunity for autobiographical reflection on embodiment; and second, making an image of a nude can furnish an occasion for expressing charitable (even erotic) feelings towards bodies. I hoped my classes would encourage others to take up these interests. To realize these purposes, I was required to figure out ways to promote different attitudes than those that prevailed up to the time I assumed responsibility for the classes. The means I adopted turned out to have unexpected results, but were highly effective. The first change I made was to turn the first half (or more) of each class session into a lecture on history and theory (including presentations on Imogen Cunningham, Joyce Wieland, Lisa Steele, Carolee Schneemann, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous) —of course, these lectures were the genesis of my books The Body in Film, A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry, and The Films of Stan Brakhage (which I had wanted to title Embodied Poetics: Beat Poetry and Stan Brakhage’s Films, but the publisher insisted on highlighting Brakhage’s name). 

The men who were taking the class as exercises in “shoot the bare lady” were not keen on the lectures, and many left the course; many of the women students found the lectures interesting. I also began hiring male models: many of the men, when they found they discovered a male model on a particular session simply walked out. I made certain the course outline had an attendance requirement (something I generally resisted doing)—so more men dropped the course. Finally, in my effort to curb the expression of misogynistic imagery, I required students to show their images to the model—as is common, most of the women models I hired were accomplished artists themselves and were supplementing their income by modelling for art classes. The men who were taking the class to express their misogynistic images were reluctant to show the images to the models (especially the models who were more accomplished artists than the male students were). This requirement also prompted many of the men to drop the class. 

In short order, the class was made up almost exclusively of women. As soon as women vastly outnumbered the men (sometimes only women enrolled), they began bringing in films, videos, and photographs that they shot at home, often exercises in self-shooting or shot by a friend under their direction; on rare occasions, women students even did in-class nude performance pieces. As for the project work for the course, I encouraged the students to bring in images (photographs, collages, films, or videos) they made outside of class. My intention in augmenting the instruction in history and theory was to encourage students to consider whatthe images of the body that recent photographers, poets and filmmakers have offered tell us about ourselves, about the way we think, and about our relationships (and it seemed to me that women theorists and artists were in the forefront of this line of inquiry).  

By the second year the course was offered in the form I had devised, and the women had come to feel safe with one another. More than that, they were intrigued by their shared interest in what nude self-representations revealed about their anxieties, longings, unease, and pleasure; that brought them to if they could create in-class performances. As a matter of policy, I almost always assent to students’ requests, because I believe that an art teacher’s goal should be to support students in discovering their strengths and their interests and to help them develop an approach to realizing those concerns: I believe deeply that an art-school teacher’s fundamental role is to help students discover what they love deeply and to help them get better at doing what they love. So, I changed the project work required so that each class member would, at the end of the semester, present an individual work (generally a series of photographs or a film, along with a write-up offering reflections on their efforts) and a couple of times in a semester those who wanted could plan and perform in a group performance that would involve improvisation (as time went on, a sub-branch of improvised performance known as contact improvisation took on an ever more significant role). It soon became clear that these nude performances meant a great deal to them—they took great satisfaction being together and reflecting collectively on the place of body in relationships (or, rather, spontaneously formulating, collectively, gestures-leading-to-thought on that topic). More importantly, these nude performances allowed for intense experiences of being together, and they understood this unusual experience was engendering profoundly original ideas for the art they wanted to make in the long run.

At the beginning in first decade of the twenty-first century, the university where I taught began offering graduate programmes. I was appointed to the first cohort of graduate faculty members, affiliated with a program that offered both Master’s and Doctoral programs. Because I had written three books on body art and corporeal cinema, I began offering a course on vanguard art’s (including performance art’s) interest in the body. The course attracted primarily women. For whatever reasons (likely their being aware of what my undergraduate students were doing was one), the women in this class too wanted to do in-class group performances. These undergraduate and graduate courses became the courses that I was most strongly identified with, almost to my retirement.

As planning (including a literature review) and rehearsals for the first performance began, these students stated with no little enthusiasm that they found the work liberating: they experienced an intense form of sharing and collaboration. They were struck with the process-orientation of the collaboration: as far as the actual performance was concerned, they got together and created in real time a novel and unrepeatable event. For them, the spiritual value experienced in the time-limited process of collaborative co-creation surpassed the aesthetic value produced by traditional means of artmaking that, ironically, explicitly strove to evoke a sense of timelessness—I characterize as ironic because the spiritual value experienced in the real-time process of collaborative co-creation provided unsought something akin to intimations of the timeless transcendent that traditional artistic means consciously sought but so often failed to achieve. Over the many years this course was offered, students continued to voice enthusiastically the feeling that nude collective performance granted revelations about the self that emerges in the process of showing/giving oneself to another/others and about being together. They came to feel strongly, to feel viscerally, that body-selves rely on being looked at by others to realize themselves and to flourish, and they felt viscerally, in their naked state, how each body craved the regard of the other and remade itself to solicit that attention. They also came to feel strongly that others’ desires mirrored their own. In other words, they came to feel, in their flesh, that each belonged to all others. 

Diaries these student performers kept reveal that these spontaneously improvised performances allowed the women to experience a new society, a community of love, emerging through connection, and to experience their provisional self-generation as occurring in relation to this process. Engaging in a form of spontaneous co-creation that bypassed immediate rationalization, they were bringing forth, pro tempore, a feminine language of kinaesthetic sensation, of movement and touch, of gesture and rhythm and repetition (a form of parler femme) that, as Luce Irigaray pointed out, is not only a threat to patriarchal culture but also a medium through which women may be creative in new ways. They were discovering a form of expression that would bring into existence alternative forms of relationship, perception, and expression and new forms of exchange through which each would intensify all others. They were generating a mixture of discourses that produced a novel intercorporeal subjectivity—they were experimenting in creating a novel micro-politics of community and a parler femme that functioned as a counter-molecular line of flight. The dynamic and improvisatory nature of their collaboration generated forms that, unlike those of men’s art, were not teleologically or narratively focalized. Instead, they were repetitive, cyclical, adventurous, meandering, unpredictable, always underway, and always without a destination. Among the revolutionary features these performances shared with other examples of radical women’s art was the effacement of the traditional divide between theory and practice. However, the thoughts—the “discourses”—the performances generated were not phallogocentrically aimed at outcomes. To the contrary, the thoughts they generated moved through and over the entire body as they sought expression—expression pro tempore.

Before long, nearly all the dissertations I was supervising were based on idea of the nude body as a research instrument, primarily for exploring experiences of togetherness and collaborative making. Those dissertations that didn’t focus on the artistic process and collaborative making dealt for the most part with woman’s erotic experience.²⁴ The latter category of dissertations usually developed out of the project work the candidate had done in my graduate course on body art as vanguard art and included photographic series of nude self-representations—the authors of those dissertations felt that creating photographic series instructed them on the specifics of female erotic desire. Their efforts at forming images of themselves were directed at studying the self-in-process. They were self-reflexive efforts that revealed the construction of a fluxing, provisional, relational identity, a provisional identity whose utility (whose pleasure motive) was to solicit un regard—or rather, whose utility was to make available to the artist’s self-understanding an image of her fantasy of constructing a provisional identity she might offer as a lure for another’s regard. (For some of these artist-writers, making these images constituted a means of reflecting relationally on male desire, for they conceived of their images as reflections on the self in the process of generating a relational self-image that might solicit a man’s attention. It is important to note that this effort at imagining oneself becoming a lure for a man’s gaze—and decidedly a particular man’s gaze—was not a sacrificial act. For it did not involve an externally imposed [because conventional] binding of energies-flows that would prevent energy from flowing all over the body—and emphatically it did not involve a binding of energies that would transmogrify the woman into a prosthetic for a man. Rather it was a free [unbound] fantasy involving the whole body and the energies pulsing across it and within it.

Applying what I learned to my own work

Photographing a nude (of whatever gender) provides an opportunity to “do gender.” When I began making films, I recognized that heretofore my female co-workers weren’t being given the same opportunity to do gender and make culture, to create pictures that reflect or express who they were, to use the nude images (of whatever gender) as a means of personal self-expression. This really was a conviction that I brought to filmmaking. Furthermore, in the culture at large, women had few to no opportunities to view pictures of nude males other than musclebound hulks, images altogether lacking in tenderness. More to the point, women were rarely actual producers of images of nudes: when it came to images of nudes, the artworld preferred they not be makers but models. The artworld’s reduction of female experience, my co-workers and I felt, was an inequity that should be combatted. 

As I outline below, the subject of the gaze (le regard) is not a passive subject—and this is acutely true being a cinematographer’s model. That role involves soliciting attention, receiving it with gratitude, and responding to it with an active understanding that one tries to convey to the other. Yet there are almost no precedents for female cinematographers/filmmakers to experience such behaviours from nude male models (in fact, I can think of none): to be dependent on the regard of another is believed to be incompatible with being a real man; men just don’t want to put themselves in that position. What is more, as far as I know, there are no precedents or parallels for a female cinematographer and a nude male model understanding the process of making nude images together as a collaboration. But that was exactly how my female co-workers and I have understood the work we did together—it has been a collaboration that, so far as I know, is without precedent or parallel, certainly in extent, and I hope in the depth of its implications for new forms in cinéma féminin.

Earlier I suggested that my work accords primary importance to bodily sensations, archaic kinaesthetic responsiveness, and the feeling that kinaesthetic empathy relates one to the circumambient world. A key factor that led to this focus (or bolstered it) was that I recognized that the oeuvres of some photographers (for example, Ann Brigman, Camille Vivier, Edward Weston, Lina Scheynius, Susan Meiselas, Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Bernhard, Tina Modotti) include images of nudes, natural forms, and landscapes that mirror one another. I was fortunate that a colleague who practised psychoanalysis pointed me towards Paul Schilder’s important work on body images/bodily schemata.²⁵ Schilder stresses the multiple nature of such body images and their dynamic character. Schilder interweaves phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and evolutionary-systems accounts of the body. He suggests that our corporeal schemata, which shape our stance towards the world, are formed by the emotional/imaginative significances accorded to parts of the body in our personal relations with others, and by the significance attached to corporeal features in interpersonal relations (routine and quotidian as much as intimate). He notes,

Body and world are experiences which are correlated with each other. One is not possible without the other. . . . From the point of view of adult thinking, the body will be projected into the world, and the world will be introjected into the body… [that is] body and world are continually interchanged. It may be that a great part of experiences will not be finally attributed either to body or world. I have mentioned the zone of indifference between the body and world and have stated that in the narcissistic stage the zone of indifference may play a more important part.²⁶ 

Bodily schemata should not be understood as internal representations of the body, a fixed self-image. Rather they are active: they are not representations, but operations. Our bodily schemata constitute the available modes in which we can experience our bodies, and they enable or inhibit our intercourse with the world. They are not the result of conscious choices but, in their association with active agencies, are dispositions for forming memories and habits of response. Thus, they help establish horizons of significance. 

Schilder introduces a key topic of his study by noting,

We take parts of the body-images of others into others, and push parts of our body-images into others. We may push our own body-images. We may push our own body-images completely into others, or in some way there may be a continuous interplay between the body-images of ourselves and the persons around us. This interplay may be between parts or wholes.²⁷

There is no question that there are from the beginning connecting links between all body-images, and it is important to follow the lines of body-image intercourse. . . . 

To be close in space increases the possibility of interrelation between body-images, and (other things being equal) closer contact between two body-images must afford a greater possibility of melding the two body-images; and the cinematographer-model (or model-cinematographer) relationship promotes exactly that sort of intimacy: it promotes the melding of body-images, as the model projects himself onto the cinematographer, hoping/imagining that she will introject his projections, modify them, and re-project onto the model.

Schilder also emphasized movement. He noted that “we do not feel our body so much when it is at rest, but we get a clearer perception of it when it moves…”²⁸ And, further, 

Movement is a great uniting factor between the different parts of the body. By movement we come into a definite relation with the outside world and to objects, and only in contact with this outside world are we able to correlate the diverse impressions concerning our own body. The knowledge of our own body is to a large extent dependent upon our action.²⁹ 

My women students’ group performances were instructive in this regard, furnishing me with a heightened awareness of how these performances bolstered the women’s collective sense of being in touch with their bodies’ fluxing energies. This togetherness-of-emerging-being was an understanding I brought to my modelling. An additional point concerning Schilder’s ideas on movement must be highlighted: he averred that the plasticity of our body-image makes it possible for us to connect with the inner dynamics of everything that moves, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. Indeed, he maintained that kinaesthetic empathy is the Ur-feeling, connecting us with the dynamism of all that populates the realm we inhabit.  Here we are very much in the space of women’s collective performance and of Plotinus’s belief that what awakens love is beautiful—gracious—movement that reveals the wondrous creativity of Life and in Plotinus’s belief in the “invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things.”

Invoking Schilder’s body schemata allows us to take into account the earthly origins of meaning and the effect emplacement has on significance. For Schilder treated body schemata as earthly—as part of the physiological system that developed through evolution—and its potentials are activated, in specific ways through its exchanges with particular elements of the environment. Accordingly, Schilder’s notion of body schemata provides a basis for a more radically situated and gendered account of the role of body in establishing a horizon of meaning concerning our emplacement and our stance towards the world—such an account acknowledges the important role that bodily schemata have in constituting us subjectively and socially, as sexed, and as culturally and nationally situated. Bodily schemata open the way to understanding the sense of release from the domineering, judging, evaluating leer spoken of by nudists—or, by extension, performers in group nude performances or by a male model: on this counter-understanding, that sense of release is not the exultation felt when one manages a rare escape from the almost inevitable, almost insurmountable dialectic of domination and humiliation described in the famous Kojève-inspired passage on the gaze in Sartre’s L’être et le néant; nor is it a form of bodily unselfconsciousness resulting from being momentarily freed from the feeling of being the object of a stranger’s regard; nor is it the result of a rare and fleeting suspension of the seemingly inevitable violence of subject/object relations and the pleasure-seeking scoptic drive role (which structures regimes of perception based on a transcendent subject objectifying the seen, with all the violence that act entails). Rather, it arises from a heightened mode of body awareness that activates an alternative bodily schema, one that accepts a mutual dynamic of scoptophilic pleasure. On this counter-understanding, giving oneself to be seen naked does not necessarily elicit a dialectic of humiliation—to the contrary, it can reawaken potentials for mutuality in seeing and being seen that overcome the degrading depredations of a transcendent, objectifying subject; this counter-scoptophilia (a possibility established by the counter–body schema) achieves the goal of mutual pleasuring by acknowledging the complicity of touch with vision on the plane of material immanence. determinants involved in framing the temporal, spatial, and communal practices through which these body schemata activate potentials for guilt-free intercorporeal exchange, dispenses with spurious ideas of the natural body, and can do so without at the same time jettisoning the sense that what these schemata activate is something elementary, something that involves the connection between the body and the world or between a body one is engaged with and a sheltering, protecting body. It can even celebrate the elementary feelings of incorporation and projection in the constitution of intercorporeality.

Before getting to those ideas, I have to make a point about the psychology of representation. The point is that, in a sense, every image that we see, looks back at us. We feel we are seen, and captured by an image; and that is especially true when the picture is one that puts people on display. Images—especially detailed renderings—construct a curiously chiasmatic relation between a viewer and an image: an image puts a body / a world on display, for us to look at, and at the same time the image looks back at us, and captures us, in an almost uncanny way, for sometimes it seems to know our inner feelings. (This, by the way, is what I think that Lacan meant by the “regard,” a topic that first arose in his séminaires in the context of a deliberation on the uncanny and on the Surrealist Roger Callois’s theory of mimesis). We feel this chiasmatic uncanny even more strongly with images of nudes. Our response to the image of a nude—especially a nude who, like that of Victorine Meurent in Édouard Manet’s Olympia, looks out at us and captures us—shows that the boundaries of the self are labile. We become aware that our subjectivity is as much in her eyes or in the air as it is between our ears. This uncanny regard makes us aware that subjectivity can become—and perhaps always is—extrapersonal. 

In the next installment . . .

To this point, I have outlined Plotinus’s views on alternate consciousness and sense of unification of the self with all that is and adumbrated some of the connections between Love, as Plotinus understood it, women’s consciousness and women’s performance art. In the third part of the three-part essay, I outline the connections between Plotinus’s ideas on the constitution of reality, women’s performance art, and the cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead, that developed in response to the science of electromagnetism attaining the status of the most advanced physical science. I also outline the influence of these triangulated ideas—Plotinus on higher consciousness, electromorphic art, and parler femme—on the sound-and-moving-image piece, Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together)  on which Ajla Odobašić and I collaborated on.

R. Bruce Elder

¹. The term αἴτιον, doesn’t really mean cause, as cause is understood in Roman philosophy or European philosophy from, say, the time of Francis Bacon (1561–1626; his Novum Organum, 1620, is the crucial work) on. In Greek, it means something like explanation, responsible element.

². In this essay, unless otherwise noted, I quote from A. H. Armstrong’s version and translation of Plotinus’s Enneads. Plotinus, Enneads I–VI, with and English Translation by A. H. Armstrong, vols 1–7 (vol 1: 1966, revised 1989; vol. 2: 1966; vol. 3: 1967; vol. 4: 1984; vol. 5: 1984;  vol. 5: 1984: vol. 6: 1988; vol. 7: 1988) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library).

³. In the twentieth century, the Tübingen School of Plato Studies has made much of this Aristotelian testimony.

⁴. The statement of these two principles is adapted from the Milanese historian of Classical and Hellenic philosophy, Giovanni Reale. See Zu einer neuen Interpretation Platons. Eine Auslegung der Metaphysik der großen Dialoge im Lichte der „ungeschriebenen Lehren“ 2nd enlarged edition (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag 2000), which offers a general overview suitable as an introduction to the topic.

⁵. This principle does not imply unlimitedness in the sense of a spatial or quantitative infinity; instead, the indefiniteness consists in a lack of determinateness and therefore of fixed form. The Dyad is termed the “Indefinite” to distinguish it from definite two-ness, i.e., the number two, and to indicate that the Dyad is not subject to mathematics. J. N. Finley writes, 

Plato applying his genius to the Socratic dialectic turned it into an ontology: generic meanings, whether in moral discourse or elsewhere, were not only real presences in the world through their many species and instances, and known and enjoyed in these, but had a more absolute being than those species and instances, and in fact conferred on the latter all the real being that they possessed. They were, moreover, not merely apprehended through their species and instances, which were often only poor illustrations of them, but rather gave their species and instances all the intelligibility of which they were capable. To generic natures or meanings Plato gave the new name of Eide or Ideas, and they were held to be neither general names on men’s tongues, nor general thoughts in men’s minds, but the only entities that could without qualification be said to be, and which were further, in some sense, supremely causative, since their instances only were what they were by exemplifying them, while they were what they were without regard to an exemplifications or instances . . . The Eide, further, are essentially unchangeable, and out of time altogether, whereas their instances are part of the perpetual flux of instantial being, and are constantly coming into being and passing away, or being replaced by the instantiation of some other Eidos.

Plato’s arithmetization of the Eide was a sublime, if unsystematic anticipation of the whole of modern scientific rationalism, with its stress on unifying patterns and measures, and that, in his retention of the countering presence of the Great and Small in all things, he also recognized the pervasive presence of an element of inexactitude and continuity in all things without which the limiting work of the reasonable element in things would be null and void. And, by his introduction of two such antithetical Principles, Plato may be held to have made a most interesting contribution to Value-theory, in that the Good is seen by him as essentially active and causative, and as engaged in an endless task of subordinating the intrinsically indefinite and chaotically multiple to predictable order and simplicity. (J. N. Findlay, “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic of the One and the Great and Small” [1983]. The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter. 113. https://orb.binghamton.edu/sagp/113: pages 4–5; 6; 3. Emphasis in original)

⁶. I proposed the transformative importance of Women’s Art in a two-part essay published in La furia umana “Woman’s Art and Ecological Aesthetics: The Way Forward: Part 1 Poetry and community or, what is wrong with the West’s conception of artmaking? Learning from the poetry of Chinese Women” La furia umana 42 (2021); and “Woman’s Art and Ecological Aesthetics: The Way Forward – Part 2 Learning about spontaneity, flux, effortless making (wu-wei), mirror relations, and emergent community from teaching women performance artists and being a model for women artists” “La furia umana 43 (2022). I deal with the idea of electrology in Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2018).

⁷. Armstrong offers a helpful footnote for “one particular breath or warmth” (οἷον ἑνός τινος πνεύματος ἢ θερμότητος μιᾶς): “Plotinus may be suggesting here that the life of the intelligible world in its complex unity is not to be thought of in terms of Stoic πνεῦμα.” 

⁸. Armstrong comments on the phrase “richly varied sphere” [σφαίρᾳ ζώσῃ ποικίλῃ], “There is a reminiscence here of Plato’s description of the true surface of the earth in the myth of the Phaedo (110B7).” He then goes on to offer a remarkable gloss on the phrase, “or imagines it as a thing all faces, shining with living faces . . . [εἴτε παμπρόσωπόν τι χρῆμα λάμπον ζῶσι προσώποις . . .]”—Armstrong says about that passage,  “What follows is strangely reminiscent of Indian many-faced representations of the gods (it is possible, though of course by no means certain, that Plotinus might have seen some small Indian image of this kind in Alexandria or elsewhere).” Enneads, vol 7 of Armstrong translation (comprising chapters 6 to 9), p. 137, ftnt 2. (on 6.7.15.26–7).

In any event, the passage foretells attributes of the electromorphic aesthetic (and of Alone (All Flesh Shall It Together))

⁹. As Armstrong points out, “κόρος,” for Plotinus, “signifies τὸ καθαρὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀκήρατον τοῦ νοῦ. For Plotinus, here and elsewhere, the word κόρος is applied to Intellect or Soul in its two meanings of “satiety” (signifying the plenitude of intelligible being) and “boy” (the son of the Father, the One)” (Armstrong, Enneads vol. 5, ftnt 1, page23 [note to 5.4.1).

Pausanius, the second speaker in Plato’s Symposium (180d–181e),distinguishes between two aspects of the goddess Aphrodite: Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία (Aphrodítē Ouranía, often referred to as Aphrodite Urania) and Ἀφροδίτη  Πάνδημος (Aphrodítē Pándēmos, that is, Aphrodite “common to all the people,” often called Aphrodite Pandemos. Renaissance writers (for example, Marsilio Ficio) and Romantic writers reworked this distinction when they formulated their contrast between Heavenly and Terrestrial love.

¹⁰. Renaissance writers (for example, Marsilio Ficio) and Romantic writers treated this distinction as being one between Heavenly and Terrestrial Love. 

¹¹. Διαίρεσις can mean division; the verb associated with it is διαιρεῖν (diaireín), which can mean to divide, pull apart, decompose, analyse, disassociate, or disintegrate.  The verb form associated with συναίρεσις is συναιρεῖν (synaireín), which can mean to meet, co-operate, associate, re-recompose, re-integrate, associate, contract, synthesize. Elsewhere, Plotinus associates συναιρεῖν with συμπλοκē (sumplokē, interweaving.)

¹². Readers might recall Pound’s emphasis, in Canto 45, of distorted desire being “contra naturam” (σε αντίθεση με την φύση). In fact, the conclusion of the poem—indeed, the whole—is utterly Neo-Plotinian. Usura, the canto says,

                                      . . . stayeth the young man’s courting

              It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

                                      between the young bride and her bridegroom

                                                                           CONTRA NATURAM

                                     They have brought whores for Eleusis

                                     Corpses are set to banquet

                                     at behest of usura.

¹³. The statement of these two principles is adapted from the Milanese historian of Classical and Hellenic philosophy, Giovanni Reale. See Zu einer neuen Interpretation Platons.

¹⁴. Translated by A. A.  Long, in “What is the Matter with Matter, According to Plotinus?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, Volume 78: The History of Philosophy, July 2016, pp. 37–54, here 46.

¹⁵. Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, Plotinus (London: Routledge, 2017).

¹⁶. Dominic J. O’Meara, review of Plotin: Traité sur la liberté et la volonté de l’Un by Georges Leroux  Phronesis  37.3 (1992): 343–349, here 348; emphases mine. Emilsson cites O’Meara’s review, and this passage specifically (p. 88), though he incorrectly gives a different article by O’Meara (“Scepticism and Ineffability in Plotinus” Phronesis, 45.3 (Aug., 2000): 240–251) as its source. 

¹⁷. Emilsson, Plotinus, 90; throughout, in citing Emilsson’s Plotinus, I have changed the manner in which the Enneads are referred, to conform to contemporary penchant for avoiding Roman numerals wherever possible

¹⁸. Emilsson, Plotinus, 43. 

¹⁹. Aristotle, for example, states this in the Metaphysics Book 9, 1049a)

²⁰. Emilsson, Plotinus, 382 (glossary entry).

²¹. Emilsson, Plotinus, 56.

²². Emilsson, Plotinus, 58, 59.

²³. Here, to convey the poetry of the expression, I use McKenna’s translation.

²⁴. One might be inclined to believe have a male professors supervising dissertations on the topic of women’s performance art and female erotic experience would be counterproductive, in the sense that it would hamper the expression of the distinctive features of such enterprises. I certainly would have believed that before living through the history I recount. I point out in the first place that this situation was not planned—it evolved organically in response to women students’ requests. Reflecting on this after the fact, I would propose that the students felt as graduate students, they would be able to explore their experiences and formulate their views on it, not to follow the lead of their dissertation supervisor—indeed, they likely concluded that is the very purpose of doing a dissertation. Second, the gender-makeup of my classes was the consequence of a concerted effort on my part to turn my courses (and work produced in them) towards reflections on embodiment and the expression of charitable (even erotic) feelings towards bodies. Third, and perhaps most important, the prevailing academic view among art school teachers at the time was that creating nude images was suspect. The idea that nude images (including artists nude self-representations and women’s nude performance art) could be used to reflect on issues of embodiment and to express charitable feelings towards bodies was roundly dismissed. This meant that women students who wanted to pursue these themes had few options regarding supervision—indeed, often women enrolled at my university (or took my courses as visiting students) because there were no other instructors/supervisors—including no female supervisors—at other institutions taking a similar approach. And fourth, at least among graduate students I supervised, these candidates saw the situation as something to be changed (as indeed did I). I would supervise their work and they would become the new cohort teaching body art.

This has happened. Now several of the women I supervised have gone on to teach—and to teach courses on the body. 

²⁵. Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche (London Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1935); reprinted (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950).

²⁶. Schilder 1935/1978, 123.

²⁷. Schilder 1935/1978, 235.

²⁸. Schilder 1935/1978, 87.

²⁹. Schilder 1935/1978, 112–113. I should point out, in contradiction to the emphasis on spontaneity in contact improvisation, that Schilder, based on his idea of bodily schemata maintained that every movement requires an anticipatory plan and each plan depends upon finding the location in the body that will allow one to begin to execute that movement. Schilder insisted that finding that location, which he referred to as “finding the body,” is never an automatic act: it necessarily involves a cognitive effort even though the selection made for the initiation of each and every movement may not require conscious effort.